moving parts of the kasper clan

I had THE most frustrating day yesterday. After a hellish night of not sleeping (darned cold!!), I wake up to find that my internet connection is totally borked. Looked at the router’s status page and it can’t get a DHCP address from my lovely ISP, Charter.net. Spent an hour on the phone with Charter’s completely unhelpful people. The guy actually said “gee, it’s kind of funny that you’re calling in with a Linksys router that isn’t able to get an IP address today–we’ve had a lot of Linksys router users call us today and tell us that.” I asked him if he didn’t think that that might be an indication of a problem in Charter’s setup and that it might be a non-coincidence that today, a bunch of Linksys-router-using people are calling?? He actually had the audacity to tell me that he thought it was Linksys’s fault… that maybe they pushed a firmware update out (HUH?!?! I have to flash my router to upgrade its firmware, dork), or maybe there’s just a bunch of Linksys routers that went belly-up on the same night (again, HUH?!?!?).

He tells me that since we can connect the Powerbook straight to the cable modem and it can get an IP address, that there’s something wrong with the Linksys router and that I will have to call Linksys for help. He says that Charter does not support any of its customers using routers at home. That’s cute. Like, you know… everyone just has one computer at home nowadays… ya dork! Now, I’ve not touched a thing on the cable modem or router in the 2 years that it’s been in my basement working fine with Charter, so I know for certain that I’ve not done anything to change things and that it must be something in Charter’s network that’s changed. The rude little Charter guy insisted that he was as high I could go for technical support and that customers weren’t allowed to talk to the network technicians. I didn’t but should have told him to bite me.

Oh, and the beauty of this is that I have Vonage for our phone provider, which means that the above conversation and the next one happened via cell phone. And the beauty of having a conversation from my house on a cell phone is that I live in the middle of a stinking forest and I get one bar of reception, if I’m lucky. So that makes for a nice, easy to understand phone call, especially when you’re talking… oh, I don’t know… to a very heavily-accented outsourced Indian support person.

So I hang up from the stupid Charter guy (I really hate Charter… did I mention that?) and call Linksys’s technical support number and start talking with a very heavily-accented outsourced Indian support person over my 1-bar cell phone connection in the middle of a stinking forest. She has a nice chat with me for a good half hour and asks me all kinds of questions about my home network and how many computers I have and how many of them are Windows (0), Mac (1), and Linux (5). Then she tells me that because my router is so old, she’s going to have to charge me $33 for helping me with it because it’s no longer covered under free technical support. So… just to clarify… because I paid $80 for a WRT54GS router 5 years ago and it’s still kicking strong, instead of… oh, I don’t know… a note of thanks or congratulations, I get a bill for $33 for her to help me get it working with Charter again. I told her that there’s no way in hell that I’m going to pay $33 for her help, which quickly led to the conclusion of that waste of a phone call. Unfortunately, seeing such amazingly awesome customer service by the likes of Moleskine and even Apple makes such patently horrific customer service as this really stand out. =:( Nice work, Linksys. I’ll be thinking more than twice about purchasing one of your products in the future.

Meanwhile, it’s like noon now and I’ve not yet been able to start work. That’s nice.

So after showering, eating, etc. I run up to the nearest Circuit City and plop down $49 for a new Linksys WRT54G2 wireless-G router, get it home, and connect it–foolishly thinking that it’ll work. Nope, same thing. About 10 minutes into my “Serenity now!!!” mental breakdown, I tried using the “MAC address clone” trick on the router. Sure enough, I entered in my Powerbook’s en0 MAC address and like magic, the new router is able to get an IP address from Charter’s DHCP servers. I run downstairs, pull the new router out, put the old WRT54GS back in, spend the next 10 minutes reconfiguring it and tell it to use the Powerbook’s MAC address, and sure enough, now it is able to get an IP address too. Needless to say, I’m taking the new router back and sticking with my old WRT54GS, thank you very much.

Gee, isn’t that a coincidence. Yep, there just must be a lot of people whose Linksys routers have died on them in the same day, ya moron.

What I think happened is that Charter rolled something out 2 nights ago so that their DHCP servers would stop handing out IP addresses to Linksys routers. Of course, Charter won’t admit to that.

So, now that I’ve officially been told by Linksys that they’re not going to lift a finger to help me if I have any problems with their router, I find this little lifehacker page that talks about upgrading your $60 router to a $600 router. I’d looked at the DD-WRT project before, but I was always a little nervous about bricking my router and having to go buy another one. With that fear now nicely removed, I figured that now’s a good time to see what DD-WRT can do. And DANG, I’m glad I did. There is so much more that I can configure with the DD-WRT interface than I ever could with the old Linksys interface. And the Web UI is so much more responsive! I’m totally impressed with it.

So, to sum up:

• Charter: you can totally bite me. As soon as I find another internet provider, you’re dumped like last week’s trash.
• Linksys: your products used to be totally awesome and then you outsourced your customer support, which means you might be saving money, but your customers are getting much less desirable support, at least as far as I’m concerned. You can sort of bite me.
• DD-WRT project: you guys totally rock.
• Forest that I live in: you rock except for making living with cell phones not fun.
• Not being able to start work until 4:30 pm because of all this: you TOTALLY suck. =:(

Oh HECK yes!!! I am SO buying this the split-second it comes out!!! Here’s an awesome review to boot!

KDE3, KDE4, Plasma, Twinview == Not Good

Originally uploaded by vanRijn

Dear Lazyweb,

This frustrates me and makes me all kinds of sad… For some reason, whenever I start my normal KDE3 session, plasma and KDE4 insists on starting up as well. So I get KDE3’s kicker and KDE4’s plasma stacked, which is less than fun and not quite useful. Also, I can’t get plasma/kwin4/kde4 to play nicely with twinview. I have an external monitor that runs @1280×960 and my laptop screen that runs @1280×800. I think it’s confusing plasma, and it looks like this. =:(

Anyone know why or how to make it better?

I’ve never had an eye exam before today, but I am a HUGE fan of Brian Regan and absolutely LOVE his skit about going to the eye doctor. It is totally hilarious! What I was not prepared for, however, was how accurate his observations were! I thought that he must have some nutty eye doctor, but he was right on, which made it even worse for me, as I was sitting in the eye exam chair, trying way too hard not to laugh. If you’ve never seen Brian’s eye doctor skit, you totally owe it to yourself to watch it. NOW!

Oh, and as an added bonus to the thoroughly entertaining morning, I found out that I have pretty durned good eyesight for a staring-at-the-computer-screen-for-12+hours-per-day guy! 20/20 in my right eye and pretty close to that in my left.

And now for something completely different…

That’s right, folks! If yer lookin’ for a big hole to throw $300 into, just go out and buy yerself a 32″ RCA CRT TV! That’s what I did just 2 short years ago, and shore enuff, the only useful purpose this monstrous beast now serves is to beep like a Geiger counter when it’s plugged in and take up a lot of space. If it works for me, it can work for you too!

Now, seriously, this sucketh mightily. I was toying with the idea of going out and plunking down a large amount of $CURRENCY for one of them new-fangled big-screen, flat-panel dealies–especially being that the PS3’s graphics are totally wasted on the old CRTs we have had, but it just KILLS me to be looking at spending that much money for something that I don’t even watch all that often. Also, I’m totally not with it as far as what technology to go with (LCD versus rear projection versus <I don’t even know what else is out there>).

So, dear reader, what would you recommend for a good quality, not horribly expensive, something that will last a long time, television?

I have discovered how to save millions on Christmas and birthday gifts. Just have something shipped to you that is packed in bubble wrap. The “something” goes to you, and the bubble wrap keeps the wife and kids entertained for hours!

I know I need to drink more water, and after the recent health disturbances, I knew I had to get serious about it. But I also knew that unless I had something unique and stylish and cool, it would be a chore to me and I’ve no hope of being consistent on something that’s irritating. And I proved that by spending a couple of weeks just drinking out of whatever glass I grab in the morning. I could never remember how many 12 ounce glasses of water I’d taken at the end of the day and normal drinkware is just so… normal.

Enter the Sigg Lifestyle Loop Top Water Bottle that I found from a local EMS store. It has definite wow factor and fits nicely into the same category of my now must-have Moleskins as combining function with absolutely beautiful and unique form. And like the Moleskins, there’s quite a following of these Sigg Water Containing Devices. They’re made from a single piece of aluminum, have some kind of special lining that prevents leeching and keeps them taste/smell-neutral, and come in a variety of uber-cool designs and sizes. Oh… I also learned that drinking from plastic bottles is not a good idea. Here’s a blurb I found:

A safe, stylish alternative to plastic water bottles, Sigg water bottles are a great choice for transporting beverages on your daily commute or while backcountry hiking. This ultra-lightweight bottle is extruded from a single piece of aluminum and holds 1 liter of fluid (33.8 ounces). Designed to fit your on-the-go lifestyle, it comes with a loop top bottle cap, which can be secured via hook or caribiner clip to a backpack or daypack.

Sigg bottles are virtually unbreakable and are constructed with no seams, ensuring a long-lasting, leak-proof performance. They also feature Sigg’s proprietary baked-on inner liner, which is made from a non-toxic, water-based epoxy resin that exceeds FDA requirements for leaching (0.0 percent) and is independently tested to be taste- and scent-neutral. Every Sigg bottle is 100 percent recyclable at the end of its life, and is backed by a lifetime warranty.

About Sigg
It all started with a simple hiker’s bottle. Today, the SIGG bottle has acquired cult status. What happened is a success story that started in Biel, Switzerland in 1908. Küng, Sigg & Cie. manufactured leisure goods, kitchenware, and electrical appliances. The company relocated to Frauenfeld in 1916, where it helped pioneer the legendary tradition of Swiss quality. Since 1998, SIGG has concentrated on its core business: drinking bottles that deliver ultimate customer benefit.

But, most importantly for me, my Sigg bottle:

• Looks really cool. Mine is ultra-shiney blue and sexy. I’m the envy of the water-consuming crowd!
• Holds 1 Liter of water. This means that I only have to remember to fill it up twice a day and I’ve had my day’s fill of water.
• Goes anywhere! The waterproof seal makes it simple to fill up and throw in my backpack for a day out and I don’t have to worry about it spilling. It also does a really nice job of keeping my cold water cold for a long time.
• Is different. Which means I like it. Which means I keep using it. Which means I’m drinking much more water now. Which means I’m healthier, yay!

Anyone else out there in Geek land discovered these cool bottles yet?

Old Geek Receipt!

Originally uploaded by vanRijn

I finally broke down and bought an HP C5180 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier dealie. It’s a sweet little device, I must admit. Very Linux-friendly, comes network-ready, and now all of our computers at home can scan and print via network, out of the box.

So, said new scanner has enabled me to pull some of my geekly receipts of yesteryear and scan them in, thereby throwing the gauntlet down for this year’s “You Can’t Be Geekier Than Me” competition. As one item of proof, I offer this receipt from 1996, wherein yours truly laid down $279.07 for a state of the art, Megahertz 28.8 PCMCIA modem. Also of note is a receipt from January, 1996 with $138.03 for 1×32 72pin module for a whopping 4 megs of RAM! And then there’s the receipt with $588.50 for a 486dx33 with 4MB of RAM, a ginormous 100MB hard drive, and a 640×480 VGA monitor.

Come on. Let’s see what you’ve got. I dare ya. =;)

I just sent off an e-mail about some of the challenges and surprises that I’ve hit as a Remote-Working Geek and it occurred to me that not only have I not blogged as of late (I suck, what can I say–but I have a list of like 10 things I need to blog about), but that the contents of my e-mail were downright blog-worthy. Here it is, minor edits notwithstanding:

So… I’m not sure what your background is, but I came from 10+ years of in-corporate-office worker-ville. And there’s some things that I didn’t expect to be challenging that turned out to be, and there’s things that I didn’t even think of that have surprised me. And there’s things that you’d expect to be challenging that are. =:)

I live in MA, currently, so there’s a timezone difference of 3 hours with my team in CA. If you’re used to a routine of getting up and to work by 9, and being home by 6-ish every day, it throws things way off when there are times you need to talk to someone before you can go further with something and you can’t get a conversation going until 9 at night, EST. And that happens lots.

It’s also definitely a bummer when you know that if you were in-office with your team, you could easily walk into their cube/office and have a half-hour conversation that would get things all squared away and get you being productive again. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted trying to construct e-mails (or IM conversations) to people that communicate clearly. It’s just maddening wasting 5 hours trying to get something resolved when if you were in-office, you’d have it nailed in a half hour.

After 10+ years of working in an office, there’s structure and physical demarcations that exist that keep your work life at work and your home life at home. Take driving or traveling to/from an office building away and it’s really hard to feel good about when you start work, when you end, and having time to transition between the two. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s something that I never even thought of. So I find myself feeling much more stressed out about work than I ever did working in an office. And my “work mind” doesn’t shut off when I walk downstairs. I find myself thinking far more about work than I ever did working in-office. I’ve reasoned that I should drive around the neighborhood or something before I start work and when the clock says it’s time to quit, but the hacker side of my brain insists that I could get so much more work done if I didn’t do that. =:)

Another thing I never thought of… the importance of physical and visual feedback from your managers and peers. In an office setting, you get constant feedback through conversations, meetings, facial expressions, body language, etc., that help you gauge how you’re doing as an employee. You get little attaboy’s, etc., and it’s pretty easy to know what other people are thinking of you without even having to explicitly ask. That’s another one I never really thought about. Working at home, there’s none of that. You can only picture in your mind what the people are doing when you’re talking on a phone call. I’ve been in plenty of phone conferences, being one of the in-office folks, and I know what goes on when the guy on the other end of the line can’t see you. =:) It’s much more difficult to feel good about yourself as an employee when you don’t have that feedback.

Probably as a means of compensating for some of the above, I find myself feeling guilty for putting in the same hours that I would be putting in if I were physically in-office. I find myself putting in crazy-long hours some days, feeling like I need to leave no doubt about my being a good worker. And the frustrating thing is again that there’s no feedback loop that helps you feel good about your status as an employee, even having done that.

I also find myself completely unmotivated to do any Open Source work as of late, owing mostly to the above, which is a frustrating side effect that I hope will even out over time.

So… heh… Most of what I’ve described is a function of my personality (over the top type-A), my personal climate (married with 3 teenage children), my age and previous work experience, etc., etc. I don’t know enough fellow remote worker geeks to poll as to whether what I’ve described is common or if I’m just nuts. And maybe none of what I’ve said would apply to you. =:)

However (in big, bold, flashing neon letters), I have absolutely no doubts that I made the right move in coming to work for VMware. I absolutely LOVE the company, LOVE the technology, LOVE my team, LOVE the work I’m doing, and LOVE being able to work from home and see my wife and kiddos more. I have never seen a more friendly place to work nor a more brilliant set of people than my team at VMware. I love Linux (especially on the desktop) and I am truly excited to be finally able to get paid to write software that allows Linux on the desktop to continue to grow market share. And I mean that with absolute sincerity. I’m a KDE hacker by heart and I am thrilled about getting to learn C/C++ better than I’ve had a chance to before as part of my day-time job. I wouldn’t want to work anywhere other than where I am right now. And I’ve honestly never been happier about what I do for a living than right now–and that feels _really_ good. =:)

So… is there anyone else out there in Remote-Working Geekland that identifies with my thoughts here?

My Replacement Moleskine!

Originally uploaded by vanRijn
Dude, seriously, my faith is much more than restored in Moleskine due to this. I had blogged previously about the premature death of my beloved Moleskine, and had forgotten all about Moleskine’s excellent warranty. Well, I e-mailed them and exactly as they’d promised, today I received a brand new, replacement Moleskine straight from Milano, Italy.

Awesome!!!

I know I’m a gushing fanboy, but as of this moment, I am a Moleskine customer for life. If only every company had this kind of commitment to their product and excellent customer service!